China's Green Energy Gap

By KEITH BRADSHER

Published: October 24, 2007

By next autumn, a muddy construction site here in a rural part of eastern China will give way to a small power plant that burns corn stalks and cotton stalks to generate electricity for nearby villages and steam for a neighboring industrial complex.

The plant would be ready sooner, but only four companies in China make the specialized precision boilers that the biomass plant requires. And all those companies are plagued by backed-up orders and delivery delays. Similar problems bedevil the wind turbine industry in China.

The same big utility company building the green plant in Boxing, CLP, has just opened a coal-fired plant in southernmost China. On schedule and built for half what it would cost in the West, that plant will generate 1,200 megawatts of electricity -- compared with 6 megawatts from the Boxing biomass plant. CLP is so impressed that it is bidding to build coal-fired plants in India with Chinese technology.

These are the realities faced by companies seeking to make themselves more environmentally friendly in China, where coal is king. Coal-fired plants are quick and cheap to build and easy to run. While the Chinese government has set goals for increasing the use of a long list of alternative energies -- including wind, biomass, hydroelectric, solar and nuclear -- they all face obstacles, from bureaucracy to bottlenecks in manufacturing. CLP's differing energy choices are a case study in how one company grapples with the need to provide electricity to hundreds of millions of impoverished Asians even as it is under a self-imposed goal of trying to limit emissions of global warming gases.

Controlled by the Kadoorie family -- one of Hong Kong's wealthiest, with a long history of supporting environmental causes -- CLP's board began considering a plan to limit greenhouse gas emissions on Tuesday.

While the details are still being worked out, the company plans to commit itself to ''material and dramatic reductions'' in such emissions in industrialized countries like Australia, while seeking to control growth in emissions in developing countries, like China, said Andrew Brandler, CLP's chief executive.

''We think the world has to address the issue of climate change as a matter of urgency,'' Mr. Brandler said.

Yet CLP's operations are growing so quickly in China, India and other developing countries in response to soaring electricity demand that Mr. Brandler said the company's total emissions of global warming gases may actually increase in the short term.

The problem is particularly acute because governments across Asia, from China and India to Indonesia and the Philippines, are turning mainly to coal to meet their soaring electricity needs and prevent blackouts, even though coal produces more global warming gases than any other major source of electricity.

China's increase has been the most substantial. The country built 114,000 megawatts of fossil-fuel-based generating capacity last year alone, almost all coal-fired, and is on course to complete 95,000 megawatts more this year.

For comparison, Britain has 75,000 megawatts in operation, built over a span of decades.

The most talked-about alternative to coal in China involves plans to quadruple the country's share of power from nuclear energy by 2020. But the plan, which contemplates dozens of reactors, still amounts to just 31,000 megawatts of nuclear power over the next dozen years.

''That's minuscule,'' said Jonathan Sinton, a China expert at the International Energy Agency. China builds more coal-fired capacity than that every four months.

Two big questions linger over even those modest goals: can equipment be manufactured for dozens of nuclear reactors, and can China train enough workers to run them?

At CLP's Daya Bay nuclear plant in Shenzhen, a house-sized dome of specially hardened steel sat next to an immense crane one recent morning, waiting to be swung and bolted into position as part of the site's sixth reactor.

But at least Daya Bay's dome is here -- reactors elsewhere in China wait up to several years. Only a handful of steel mills around the world can cast the thick domes, and only now are the first two mills in China taking delivery of equipment to make them.

The plant's 1,750 employees, meanwhile, are training 500 interns at a time, according to Stephen Lau, the first deputy general manager of the plant; the government-owned nuclear power company asked that 1,000 be trained at a time, but the joint venture running the plant could not handle that many.

By contrast, there is no shortage of workers to run coal-fired power plants. China is dotted with decrepit state-owned coal-fired plants that each employ 900 to 1,000 people to produce just 50 to 100 megawatts. The government frequently asks companies to close one of these inefficient, heavily polluting operations and provide jobs or money to the workers before allowing the construction of a new coal-fired plant.

CLP's modern coal-burning plant in Fangchenggang in southernmost China -- a pair of 260-foot gray towers looming over a tropical landscape of woods and emerald rice fields dotted by gray oxen -- employs just 270 workers to generate 1,200 megawatts.